Travel ICO – great investment idea to fund your travels

Disclaimer: Following post is purely for information purpose. The author is not a financial advisor. Please remember, that making any kind of investment is a risk. If you are not sure what you are doing, consult with your financial advisor before making any decision.

It’s been a while since I wrote about investment ideas. I have been steadily investing money in various projects and tools, such as loans and the stock market, simply trying to make a habit of not spending it all at once and securing my future.

Lately, I have been following some famous bloggers who travel the world and make video blogs. They all had something in common – none of them were worried much about cutting their expenses. Soon, I learned how they were making their living – with cryptocurrencies and something called ICOs. Let me explain in more detail.

PS – you already know everything about Cryptoworld and ICOs, feel free to scroll all the way down to the Travel Ico section, where I have listed all currently active travel ICOs.

What is ICO?

ICO means Initial Coin Offering. It’s kind of like when a new company enters stock market and sells their shares. When you participate in ICO, you invest in the company and get their coins (or tokens) in return. After ICO, when this company enters exchange market, you can sell your coins back for Ethereum/Bitcoin and make profit. Or you can keep them, if you think the coin has potential to grow further.

How to participate in ICO and buy tokens?

Most tokens (or coins) issued during ICO are sold for cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin and Ethereum. What are they? Well, you can think of them as just another currency, like US Dollar or Euro. The difference is that you actually cannot touch them, they don’t have physical equivalent. On the other hand – money on your bank account is not visible to you either.

Buy Ethereum first

Before you can participate in ICO, you need to buy Etherium or Bitcoin at one of the many crypto market exchanges. There are lot’s of them nowadays. I personally use Kraken. So, the process is quite simple – you need to create an account, verify yourself (your name, email, home address, document photo and utility bill scan). The process is fairly easy and I got verified within a couple of hours.

Next, you will get instructions how to make deposits to your account. I chose to wire transfer (or SEPA in Europe), made it in euro’s and the money was in my Kraken account in less than 24 hours. Once it arrived, I bought some Bitcoins and then changed them for Ethereum.

How to Store your crypto money?

You should never store your crypto currencies at exchange platform, because in case it gets hacked, you will lose all your money! As soon as you have your Ethereum, you can transfer it to a wallet. What is a wallet? It’s an encrypted, digital storage that is secure and safe (mostly). There are many different types of wallets. I chose to use MyEtherWallet because it seemed pretty easy to use.

So, I transferred all my Ethereum to MyEtherWallet and then, from my wallet to an ICO that I chose. The first ICO that I participated in was called Datecoin. Their website had all the needed instructions how to deposit Ether and buy their tokens. The ICO hasn’t finished yet, so I can’t say how much profit I’m going to make, but things are looking good so far.

What happens after ICO?

When the ICO is over, you will have a chance to transfer your new coins back to your own wallet. ALWAYS make sure your wallet can accept these types of coins. If for some reason it doesn’t, you may lose your coins! Once the coins are in your wallet, you may decide to either sell them or keep them. If you decide to sell, you would need to transfer them to your exchange platform account, where you can trade them back to Ethereum.

The risks

As with any other investments, betting your money on cryptocurrencies may be risky. In fact, this is much riskier than the traditional stock market. Many things can go wrong, such as coins may be stolen by hackers, ICO may seize to exist, tokens may may lose their value, etc. Before you go ahead and invest, be sure to investigate following aspects:

Who is this company? Has it been around for a while?

Who are the people behind it? Are they professionals? Check their LinkedIn profiles

Do they have a working prototype?

Does the idea make sense to you? Can you explain it with your own words?

Join their Telegram channel and speak with them directly – are they answering queries?

Check what other investors are saying about this project in forums, Reddit etc.

Even if the project seems to be 100% legit, don’t ever invest more than you are able to loose without worrying about it. Try with one ICO for starters and deposit small amount just to try it out. The ICO that I participated in accepting investments from 0,1 ETH (CA 60 EUR). That’s exactly how much I decided to invest and take it as a learning experience. If their coin price goes up, I might withdraw my initial investment and keep the rest for future.

Travel ICO?

Yes, there are some great travel ICOs that we all can participate in. At the time of writing this post, these are:

TripBit – all-in-one platform solution that will allow consumers to book flights, hotels and events with either cryptocurrency or fiat (EUR, USD etc). Among other things, TripBit promises to get rid of Double Bookings (so common and annoying right now in the travel industry), deliver reseller service (you can sell your ticket to other travelers), bundle packages and many other cool services. ICO is live until July 3rd, 2018. It makes sense to buy them tokens now and spend them on your future travels.

Cultural Places – The main message is “Blockchain meets Culture”. Based in Austria, this new project is aiming at becoming the new social network for cultural world. The company promises to deliver easier access to location based information, ticketing, crowdfunding, map & routing and trip planning – all on one platform. Ending soon – June 4th, 2018 – so hurry up!

I will be updating this post with new upcoming ICOs for travel & tourism industry, so feel free to come back later!